Strong Medicine
Melissa Holbrook Pierson : China
An epic portrait of the Tianenmen Square protests, Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is one hell of a powerful novel.
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Fathers and Sons
Matt Steinglass : China
Three recent books trace the generational fault lines of the Confucian family during China's past and present revolutions.
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The James Gang
Brenda Wineapple : Biography
In Henry James and his family, biographers find a fascinating story of dynastic melodrama.
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Bright Oblivion
Emily Wilson
A new translation of Sophocles' Ajax derives chilling power from its infidelity to the original text.
2007
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Little Disturbances, Enormous Changes
Remembering Grace Paley and the impact she had on literature, activism and many generations of women and children.
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God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
John Leonard : Public Figures & Intellectuals
Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away Wednesday, will be remembered for his brilliant, cynical and often depressing humor.
2006
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Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation
Egypt has been deprived of its greatest living writer, and the world has lost one of its most humane literary figures.
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The Strange Silence of Günter Grass
By concealing for a near-lifetime that he had served in the Waffen SS, literary giant Günter Grass treated himself with an indulgence he did not hesitate to deem a moral defect in others. And for that, we are all losers.
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Sorel's People
In Literary Lives, caricaturist Edward Sorel tells all and then some about giants like Yeats, Proust, Hellman and Jung within the humble frame of a comic strip.
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Beckett at 100
No playwright has given plainer witness to the planet's most violent century or borne such loving witness to the dispossessed.
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Remember 'The Jungle'!
As Upton Sinclair's novel turns 100, it reminds us that the best way to nurture pride in America is to see its underbelly--and tell the truth about it.
2005
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The Twilight Zone
Though Bergelson wrote in Germany during the 1920s, his stories in Shadows of Berlin are more focused on the past apocalypse than the impending one.
This week: A look at the advocacy group MoveOn.org at 10. Plus: Controversy in Africa over the indictment of the Sudanese President; Amy Alexander and Chris Rabb on the challenges facing minority journalists in their transition to the web; and The Nation's new sex column. (13mb mp3)
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